Timing is Everything -- When to Sell

The timing of your sales presentation is critical to your success. Timing is everything.

When do most speakers introduce their materials? At the end! That’s selling suicide!

What’s happening at the end of your speech? Your audience is already thinking about their next appointment, their lunch, or their flight out of town. They are already packing up their materials, putting away their notes, checking their voicemail and turning on their pagers (if they ever turned them off).

Psychologically, as soon as your audience senses you are almost finished, they quickly turn you off and focus on their own issues. They are not listening to your sales presentation and they are not in a buying mode.

You have to appeal to their buying mode at the height of their interest in your information—and that’s never at the end of your speech.

Here’s the secret—

You introduce your materials before the end of your speech and after you have you created enough value to justify the investment.

This is critical—if you wait too long you’ll compete with all the other distractions—and if you sell too early your audience won’t see the relationship between your price and the benefits.

I never know exactly in advance when I will introduce my materials, but it’s always when I see the audience is really getting it, when I am getting a lot of positive feedback. My rule of thumb—if I stopped speaking right after my sales presentation, have I already created enough value to justify the investment?

I save powerful ideas for that period after the sales presentation. This is important, because any great information, any value I give after the sales presentation is “gravy.” It reinforces the buying decision already made and converts the holdouts who are still thinking about investing.

As a rule, I tend to hit that “enough value” point about two-thirds through my speech. In a speech longer than two hours, it’s about thirty minutes before the end. That’s enough time to establish value and leaves enough time to make the buying decision. Plus, it leaves enough time to add more value before the end.

In a shorter speech of 60-90 minutes, I might have to make the sales presentation 15 minutes before the end.

By the way, I have found over several years of trial and error that the longer your speech, the higher your percentage of buyers will be and the more you can charge for your materials. My ideal duration is 2½-3 hours. Less time than that forces me to limit the amount of value I can deliver. Longer than that duration has never increased sales. There is a diminishing return, I believe, and that after a point, you can’t add significant value and impact. In fact, your audience gets tired…and when your audience gets tired, they don’t buy.

If you do full or 2-day seminars, I suggest you treat each half day as a presentation and introduce your materials twice—two-thirds or so before the lunch break and two-thirds or so before the end of the day.

For the same reason I don’t wait until the end of the speech to sell, I don’t try to sell right before a break. Unless the audience doesn’t know the break is coming, they will be thinking about their fourth cup of coffee, their cell phone, or their sprint to the restroom. For sure, they are not listening to you. I have had some success introducing my materials right after the break, but sometimes it’s difficult to get the audience back in an attentive mode right away.

My preference is to introduce the materials and immediately get back to my content. That’s so the audience realizes that my main reason for being there is to teach them, not sell. If your sales presentation timing looks staged, people will resist you.